I recently recorded a webinar with the SolarWinds Service Desk team called“The Unified Front Door: Delivering An Excellent Employee Experience” on how the concept of employee experience has changed and will continue to change IT support and wider IT service management (ITSM) approaches and capabilities. This article covers some of the topics discussed, using sound bites with edits for brevity.
Why Employee Experience Is Becoming an IT Support Priority
“I think for a lot of organizations, it is something they want to do, it might even be something that they think they do, but the issue comes where the proverbial ‘rubber hits the road,’ where they’re actually doing, doing anything, or doing the right things.
“In terms of where organizations are, a lot depends on the focus and the ability to execute. I guess that sounds familiar for a lot of what we do, so some organizations are doing it, some are struggling, some are planning to do it, and some are willing to do it. You’ve got a real spectrum, and for me it ultimately comes down to – if we take it from an IT service desk or IT support perspective – your ‘reason for being.’”
Are you offering IT support or people support? Employee experience likely involves cultural change, not simply process change.
How AI Can Improve Employee Experience Through Prevention
“I think it’s really important for us not to overlook value as we think of how we can best use AI to improve what we do as IT service providers – to generate business value.”
“The basic premise for the greatest AI-delivered value is that we shouldn’t have to wait for someone to fire up a chatbot or to start a chat or to submit a ticket; we should know, for instance, that my desktop here is running out of disk space, or I’ve not had the latest version of some particular application, or some security patch. There’s a lot that can be done in the background, using AI, to fix things before I, as the end user, say, ‘Hold on, my machine’s running like a dog,’ or ‘My VPN doesn’t work.’”
Deliver IT Support Where Employees Already Work
“I always say the best IT support channel is often dependent on the issue or the need. Outside of IT, if I want help from the bank, I’ll probably phone them, because otherwise I’m ‘going around the houses.’ I’ll do a chat with Amazon, though. I might have to invoke the ‘Can I speak to a human please?’-card every now and again, but I know most of the time that the chat or the AI employed in the chat will work.”
“The channel thing still applies with IT support and AI; sometimes it’s going to be easier and better to fire up a chat in Slack or Teams, or whatever you’re using, but sometimes picking up the phone is best, particularly if something is really vital to your work. ‘Choice’ is probably the word to use here, that people need choice in the IT support channel.”
Choice will affect the delivered employee experience.
Understanding and Meeting Employee Expectations
“Are we just measuring the mechanics of IT support rather than the outcomes, or do we not fully understand the expectations of the people we serve, and if we don’t understand them, how can we ensure that we are delivering against them?”
“I’m reminded of something that I still say, and I feel as though I shouldn’t need to say. When we look at how we improve things, and I have no statistical evidence on this, I say I think we improve the stuff we’re good at, because it’s easier. We don’t improve at what we’re not good at. We need to think, “Let’s not improve incident management for the 25th time in the last two years. Let’s look at problem management, or capacity management, or availability management, or employee experience management. Let’s try and find something else where we can say we’ve actually made a difference – and not a difference to how we work, but a difference to the outcomes that what we do results in.”
Rethinking IT Support Metrics
“You could argue that we measure the easy things, but I think more realistically we measure what we’ve been told to measure by best practice over the last 20 years, that we say first-contact resolution is important, number of tickets is important, mean time to resolution or mean time to repair is important, and CSAT is important.”
But all these metrics usually focus on the operation of the IT service desk, not the end-user’s outcome or experience.
Hopefully, all this helps, but listening to the soundbites (and others) in context will be far more valuable. Here’s a link to the SolarWinds employee experience webinar.
Webinar 10-minuite teaser:
Employee Experience FAQs
That distinction sits at the center of the article: are IT teams offering IT support or people support? Employee experience is likely to involve cultural change, not simply process change, and organizations adopting experience management fall across a spectrum, from doing it well to struggling, largely depending on focus and their ability to execute.
The strongest use of AI here isn’t waiting for someone to open a chatbot or submit a ticket. It’s catching issues in the background, such as a disk running low on space, an outdated application, a missing security patch, and fixing them before the employee notices anything’s wrong.
There isn’t one best channel; it depends on the issue and the person. Sometimes a chat in Slack or Teams works better, sometimes picking up the phone is the right call, particularly when something is vital to the work at hand. The article frames this as a question of choice: giving people the ability to pick the channel that suits the moment.
Metrics like first-contact resolution, ticket volume, mean time to resolution (MTTR), and customer satisfaction (CSAT) often track the IT service desk’s operations, not what the outcome means for the person with the issue. The article also argues that organizations tend to keep improving what they’re already good at, like incident management, rather than turning to areas such as problem management, capacity management, or experience management, where a real difference to outcomes could be made.
The soundbites in this article are edited for brevity. The full conversation is available in the SolarWinds Service Desk webinar linked at the end of the article.
Stephen Mann
Principal Analyst and Content Director at the ITSM-focused industry analyst firm ITSM.tools. Also an independent IT and IT service management marketing content creator, and a frequent blogger, writer, and presenter on the challenges and opportunities for IT service management professionals.
Previously held positions in IT research and analysis (at IT industry analyst firms Ovum and Forrester and the UK Post Office), IT service management consultancy, enterprise IT service desk and IT service management, IT asset management, innovation and creativity facilitation, project management, finance consultancy, internal audit, and product marketing for a SaaS IT service management technology vendor.
